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The Effort Pays Off: Why It's Good to Publish in Lit Mags

Laura van den Berg was raised in Florida and earned her M.F.A. at Emerson College. Her stories have or will soon appear in Ploughshares, One Story, American Short Fiction, Conjunctions, Glimmer Train, Best American Nonrequired Reading 2008, Best New American Voices 2010, and The Pushcart Prize XXIV. Her first collection of stories, What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us (Dzanc Books, 2009), was a Barnes & Noble “Discover Great New Writers” selection, longlisted for The Story Prize, and shortlisted for the Frank O’Connor International Award. She is also the recipient of the Emerging Writer Lectureship at Gettysburg College, the Tickner Fellowship at the Gilman School, The Julia Peterkin Award, scholarships from the Bread Loaf and Sewanee Writers' Conferences, and fellowships from Spiro Arts, Ragdale, and VCCA. She has recently taught in the writing programs at Goucher College, Johns Hopkins University, and George Washington University. Her second collection of stories, The Isle of Youth, is forthcoming from FSG. Laura currently lives in Baltimore.

Here she discusses how lit mags have shaped her career...

Why publish in literary magazines? They typically pay little, if at all, and, except for top-flight journals, distribution can be spotty at best. Yet year after year, reading period after reading period, we diligently prepare our manuscripts and cover letters and send our darlings out into the world—a testament to the deeply important role literary magazines continue to play in the lives of writers.

There are countless reasons why literary journals remain such a vital venue. On a practical level, publishing credits build professional legitimacy. A publishing record can prove helpful in applications for teaching jobs, residencies, and grants; for some applications, a solid list of publications are in fact required. When a writer begins querying agents, good publications can help their submission stand out from the pack. In addition, publishing in literary journals make writers eligible for the myriad of annual anthologies, such as Best American Short Stories, O. Henry Awards, and The Pushcart Prize. Even the more specialized anthologies—Best American Mystery Stories, Best American Fantasy, Best American Nonrequied Reading, Best New Stories from the South—carry a lot of prestige and attract multitudes of readers. The stories selected for these anthologies are almost exclusively culled from literary journals large and small—and online journals are now getting their due with print anthologies like Best of the Web. While anthology selections are as competitive and arbitrary as any other aspect of the literary marketplace, you never know when your story, poem, or essay might get a “second life” via an anthology inclusion.

Most importantly, literary magazine publications give emerging writers a chance to cultivate what they hunger for most: an audience, an opportunity to connect with readers. When a work is published, it leaves the hands of the author and enters the hands of the reader, an exchange that marks the author’s contribution to a larger artistic dialogue. More often than not, the evidence of our contribution remains invisible, but being able to partake in this broader conversation is always a cause for gratitude.

Moreover, anyone worried about the health of the short story will find much consolation in the pages of literary magazines. You only need to read a few issues of One Story or American Short Fiction or Glimmer Train or Noon or Tin House or McSweeney’s or Ploughshares, just to name a few, to be assured that the short story is not only alive and well, but positively thriving.

On a more personal note, publishing in journals played a significant role in the development of certain aspects of my writerly outlook. Before publishing my first story, I accumulated enough rejections to paper the walls of my apartment—an invaluable early lesson in the omnipresence of rejection in a writer’s life. Even as I published more stories, even as I finished a book and secured representation from a wonderful agent, who then secured the book’s publication, rejection is still something that I—and practically every other writer out there—face on a regular basis. The massive amount of rejections I garnered early on taught me not only that rejection was something I needed to get used to, but also the importance of separating my artistic ambitions from my professional ones.

In the beginning, I too often personalized rejection; wracked with self-doubt, I projected my own anxieties about my talent onto the submission-inundated editors who, of course, didn’t know me from Adam. Why does this editor dislike me so much? I once thought after receiving yet another form rejection from a journal I especially admired. Do they not think I have what it takes? At this particular time in my writing life, I was simply clueless; I had no idea that thousands of writers were vying for publication in the same journals, or how much my work needed to improve before it would be deserving of publication. But gradually, I began to learn things. I tried to take the ego out of the submission equation. I diligently sent out stories, maintained my submission log, and when rejections came in the mail, I tossed them into the trash with as little anxiety-induced projecting as I could manage. I saved the angst for writing and revising, for laboring over sentences and paragraphs, scenes and characters.

Despite the business-like mentality I was striving to adopt, when I began working for a notable literary magazine as a graduate student, it was still sobering to realize how utterly insignificant the individual submitter is. This is not to say the staff didn’t work hard to treat each submission with the basic level of respect that any reputable journal would, but when editors and readers are dealing with thousands upon thousands of submissions, each writer is, quite literally, just another number. After a few months of employment, I felt incredibly foolish for ever taking a rejection personally. I learned that rejection, as practically any editor will tell you, is rarely personal—because, in all likelihood, the editor simply has no idea who you are. I learned that I was a single fish in a sea of millions, a blip on the screen. I learned that no one cares whether I keep writing or not.

Such lessons were at first humbling, then a little depressing, and then oddly empowering. Empowering in that they made me work harder. I became more disciplined with my writing schedule, more rigorous with my revision. I kept submitting, but I treated it like an office job—something I did a few hours a week, a completely separate entity from my fiction. I sent out stories knowing that my submission might get lost behind an editor’s filing cabinet, never to be seen again, or be rejected on sight because a reader just hated that first sentence I loved so much. As someone who has a tendency to spend too much time looking outwards for validation, I learned that if I kept relying on external praise to keep me motivated, my writing was bound to suffer terribly. I had to learn to look inward. I had to care enough, and believe in myself enough, to make up for all the people who didn’t. I should note that this quest for self-reliance is ongoing. It doesn’t come naturally to me, this kind of confidence, but as long as I have enough confidence to keep writing, then that’s really all that matters.

So why is publishing in literary magazines important? In short, if you are rejected, you’re getting valuable training in the inevitable disappointments that come with being a writer. In my case, the process of submission and rejection, the process of working for a literary magazine and witnessing firsthand the astonishing number of emerging writers out there, helped me locate the internal toughness that I needed. If you are accepted, you’ll know that an editor has been moved, by the power of your words, to care. That you have gone from submission # 935 to a writer of interest and merit. That you have made a passionate connection with a single reader. That with publication, you will likely make more passionate connections with more readers. As writers, this is the best thing we can hope for